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Robert McDonald

Robert M. S. McDonald is a professor of history at the United
States Military Academy and an adjunct scholar of the Cato
Institute. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford
University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
where he earned his Ph.D. A specialist on Thomas Jefferson and the
early American republic, he is author of Confounding
Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own
Time (University of Virginia Press, 2016). In addition
to essays and articles in journals such as The
Historian, Southern Cultures, and
the Journal of the Early Republic, he is editor
of Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West
Point (University of Virginia Press,
2004), Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power
of Knowledge (University of Virginia Press, 2012),
and Sons of the Father: George Washington and
HisProtégés (University of Virginia Press,
2013). He is completing an edited volume to be
titled Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the
Battle for History. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York,
with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and
Grace.